Google: Incremental Improvements May Not Impact Rankings

In a recent episode of Google’s Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, cautioned site owners against overly fixating on incremental improvements to their Core Web Vitals scores.

Mueller suggested that these minor optimizations may yield few visible search ranking changes.

Core Web Vitals, a set of user-centric metrics measuring website performance, have been a focal point for many since Google announced they’re used in ranking systems.

The metrics, which include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and the recently introduced Interaction to Next Paint (INP), have driven site owners to optimize their pages for better scores.

However, Mueller’s comments highlight the potential pitfalls of over-optimizing for these metrics:

“I think a big issue is also that site owners sometimes over-fixate on the metrics themselves. They see some number, and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to get this to like some other number, some higher state.’ And then they spend months of time working on this. And they see this as they’re doing something for their Search rankings. And probably a lot of those incremental changes are not really visible in Search.”